


Pas de Deux

by guileheroine



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Character Study, F/M, Friendship/Love, Ice DANCING!, Ice Skating, Pre-Het, Sad and Sweet, Sports, Unresolved Sexual Tension, sue me, the masami on ice that nobody asked for
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-26
Updated: 2018-02-26
Packaged: 2019-03-24 06:06:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13805022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/guileheroine/pseuds/guileheroine
Summary: n.1. a dance for two performers2. an intricate or close relationship involving two partiesAsami is an ice dancer and she has a lot of feelings about her partner.Masami Ice Dance AU, inspired by all the beautiful Olympics content we have been inundated with.





	Pas de Deux

**Author's Note:**

> they're dancing to your favourite song, or 'be your love' by bishop briggs if you're an indecisive f/ck like me

 

 

> _Having perfected our disguise,_
> 
> _we spend our lives searching for_ _someone we don't fool._

 

This is almost her favourite part - the promise that comes the second before the melody does; of a frank and fervent dialogue, four minutes’ heart to lonely heart.

 

She meets his eyes tight with cool focus. Asami swallows in what she hopes he will see as unconscious determination, nothing warmer and weaker.

 

An injudicious Instagram scroll had thrown her off again. Always before a performance - she did it to herself. She’s going to have to unfollow anything and anyone press-related, ‘reputable’ or not, against the advice of her coach. This time it isn’t a snide snippet about the integrity of her club, at least. Just the presumptuous speculation about her partnership, which is better. Marginally. If nothing else, it’s a different flavour of bitter.

 

Mako, too, is off-er than usual today - a round on the ice to find their place and pace and he still has the stiffness in his spine normally only obstinately omnipresent when he’s off it. The nerves that a new program like this brings, or likelier, that the hawkeyed audience does. He is a natural performer who doesn’t like to be watched. Asami a shade of the opposite, if anything (but probably not anything. Nothing fancier than a woman doing her favourite job.) _Shake it off,_ she’d smile at him, if she wasn’t in a mood after the probing article. She doesn’t feel like talking. Not yet, at least, and certainly not in words. Anyway, it’s time. They blink.

 

She closes her eyes to give the music a second and then relinquishes it all to him. And he’s off with her soul in perfect time. Like they practised, but she never quite has to practise that part.

 

They glide; she watches the light shimmer in the cranberry of her own skirt. They circle to meet one another and she feels the tightness in the line of his arm again in her own, impeccably synchronised as they are.

 

Asami can dance that tension out of him. But no, she doesn’t feel like talking; or she can’t until she has this lift out of the way - her head too foggy with the residual poignant distaste of her ill-advised pre-dance ritual to manage both at once. She wants him to come and meet her and help her forget it about it. Something Mako does well unconsciously, like move with her and move her - that might fluster him into vacancy if she brought deliberate attention to it.

 

The first lift is the deadliest. Okay. She sticks the landing, wondering if he feels her breath shudder behind the flick of her hair when his hands bring her body back together. A round of applause, injecting their mutual rhythm with a consolidating buoyancy that Asami has been impatient for. _That’s right, come back to me._ His chest and her hands on it relax slightly. She sweeps behind him without disconnecting their gaze until she must, but it’s not an anxious release. A splayed hand curves his back and they coalesce again.

 

Two years on the ice together isn’t that long, apparently. But two seconds chest to chest is; two minutes in a jittery comfort handhold - two hours on another private plane, or two bottles before sunrise. They all stack like the pins in her hair holding it out of their way as she spins, so they can loop back together again.

 

Faces mirrors, smoothing familiar breathlessness into quietly determined mouths. There’s a lot of looking in eyes in this routine - like dancing as a whole, it’s a gruelling thing that manages to make her feel right like nothing else. At once nervous and euphoric. Transported - that covers the duality well, the pleasant distress. Skating’s a lot like being in love. Mako pulls her shoulder blades back into his chest, lifts her off the ice. When she slices back a second later, she’s even more wired, but they are even more fluid.

 

She knows his story better than if he told it to her himself. His body isn’t as quiet as he is, and she supposes it’s funny in an aching kind of way how intimately she can know that without knowing it the ways she wants. Well, the other ways she wants.

 

Her father was still pumping millions into the club when Mako joined it. Someone he knew had scouted him - sneaking onto the rink after hours. Someone, Asami suspected, that was more in with both her father and Mako than either would have liked to admit, though for different reasons. He was the mysterious hotshot in no time, with the discipline to train his already straight and disciplined style. He only learned because he had procured some second-hand boots - “the skid row way of learning to skate,” he had scowled, dark and long on the bleachers about a week after they had met. Asami decided she didn’t dislike it when he scowled, because she wished she could do it like him. As freely.

 

She was already a novice, she had said somewhat proudly. Briefly, under his gaze, that was exactly what she felt like - and she berated herself for it, she was _cool_ \- until a shy smile broke through that betrayed his own awe. It wasn’t exactly (or only ) for her figure skating skills.

 

His crush was all but gone, so she divined from the long hours spent studying one another - by the time her own faded - so she _thought_. But she had been so busy grasping him, figuring out the way his heart ticked, that she hadn’t noticed where hers had fallen while she was peeking in to marvel.

 

Now her knowledge is pretty complete, but she can’t stop finding reasons to keep marvelling.

 

He returns with a robust grace when they come out of the spin, and she follows the line of muscle in his shoulders as she twirls with his extended arm. It’s incredible to watch him in motion, second only to partaking. She had definitely warmed up quick or early on occasions just to be able to wait for him to finish.

 

They paired the spring after her second junior competition, when the governing body decided that her father’s _incentives_ weren’t helping the judges do their job. Many of her clubmates found themselves disgraced in the crossfire, their competitive histories in jeopardy. A huge blow to their club, which Asami bore the brunt of, because surely as Sato’s daughter she should be the ultimate benefactor of whatever leverage he gained with his bribes. She wanted to scowl at her accusers.

 

Mako helped her on to her feet and she brushed herself off, walked it off all the way to nationals with him.

 

 _You know, I don’t actually like dancing with other people most of the time,_ he told her once, not long after they began dancing together.

 

 _Me neither,_ she admittedly hesitantly, not adding _except you._ He was only surprised for a vague moment to find that from her, like he had known it already deep under and it took just that second to dispel any preconceptions of her that clouded it.

 

Now she listens to _except you_ for the duration of every dance, on any day. Today’s no exception, however they may have started.

 

He had been a stubborn wall to scale at first. It was hard to get through the close, discreet defences he had built up - it still is, sometimes. But if she has some doubt, some grievance, some question to which he remains non-committal - he is before her without pretense on the ice. Their bodies meet and talk. It’s the one place where he resists none of her earnest exploration.

 

When Asami’s on the inside edge and he has to bear back to let her in, she wonders if she’s pushing too hard. If he minds the attention. Then they switch in perfect time, her weight shifting to her heels - gentle palms on bursting ribs; and _he_ leans in to her outside edge and grants her everything.

 

They’re going to have a conversation.

 

He’s still a little quick and tight under her arms - still not completely with her, though they’re traversing the gap with every foot on the ice. She can expedite this process. _Look at me_ , she pulls him in on a parallel spread eagle. And he eases. It kind of hurts that she can do that to him so effortlessly, clean and simple.

 

Mako does find her earnest. Or, earnest is what he’d call it in a person less guarded, but Asami knows he has managed to find some weird solace in her (guarded) idealism. He’d never think of wearing his own heart so open, but hers is there for him like an anchor to the beauty of the world. It unbalances her in the most touching of ways: it’s the most touching of privileges.

 

 _I’m looking_ , he answers, by never looking away as he sails backward, Asami skating as if to catch him. There’s a glint of stern humour under the focus, sparking, glowing like she’s dancing light back into him. As long as he meets her, he can find it. Cruel that she can do all that for him, and the papers can still spit her truth at her like it's anyone but his to know, if he wished to know. The ache pierces back with an acrid vengeance.

 

She almost slips on her counter turn, free leg wobbling.

 

He pulls her back to him with his eyes just as she had him. A firm press over the mesh on the curve of her waist that is _just_ superfluous for the next move, to reassure her after the near miss. Asami’s skin starts. He’s lucky not to cause another misstep.

 

She'd convince Mako to skate for fun sometimes, when the outdoor rink across town opened every winter. He’s different amongst scores of others for whom this is the first or only time on the ice all winter, the self-serious children and childlike couples. He exhibits no less control this way than during training - it’s borderline irritating and almost as impressive in its meticulousness. It had felt sort of like a date the first time. _This isn’t practice,_ she’d reminded him with a teasing twinkle. He can’t help that soberness, but leading in him laughter is her favourite thing to do. _You chill_ , he’d retorted finally, with enough goading, biting his cheek; pulling her with him in a sudden sweep that lifted her blades off the ground. She yelped and squeezed his gloved hand when she made contact again, and led him then through languid, happy sways under the white winter sun. They danced to their own music for once.

 

In fairness, that’s how they end up eventually on a good day. Now the music doesn’t matter, because they’re dancing to each other under the harsh stadium lights.

 

His meticulousness is usually a good thing - it helps draw her own control. He thinks of _everything_ , and it had plugged any gaps in Asami’s confidence as they progressed. His sharpness is intense and carefully cultivated; focus maintained with intense focus. Such are Mako’s priorities.

 

So she was surprised that time he sighed, _Least you’re here to bring some sensitivity to this routine_ \- rare, resigned candour after a difficult day on the rink. He spat the word, but without malice. A moment of frustration at his own inability to loosen, let the new music guide them even after he’d got the moves down with precision.

 

 _You’re sensitive, though,_ she thought curiously. Then she realised the difference was that he couldn’t seem to help but try to rein his sensitivity in.

 

He celebrates _hers_. He likes it in her. It means he can rely on her, for the honest flair in this combination lift, for instance, while he concentrates on keeping her up. And so Asami learned to like that, even though sensitivity is what kept her from scowling her regrets out.

 

The lift is a breeze. She flows with him through the stages before their final spin, each an extension of the other now.

 

She spies the stands from over Mako’s shoulder. No one really kisses or cries for them when they’re in the kiss and cry. Mako is either genuinely or deliberately apathetic depending on the day but Asami feels a deep pang when she sees families dispensing it all without a care, privileged enough to throw their love around almost thoughtlessly. She thinks about her father. Alone is not the same as strange, but it makes you feel a little like a stranger. Always a little out of sync with the rest of the world: she had felt that both keenly and dully but near constantly after cutting him off.

 

There’s nothing of that here with Mako now, when they’re side by side in perfect step; as though the exact knowledge of him that she had carefully built - his very presence on the ice with her - had clicked her back into place in turn.

 

The article this morning was all fire and heat in its overripe language, but one last week had called her _aloof_. It had only made her feel more aloof, but that was funny and fine an afternoon later when they were together, near smiles locked through a sit spin in the terrific cold during practice, rapidly blinking a silent laugh as they tried not to let it sting for the speed.

 

Quietly liberating: how she feels less alone not simply for his company, but the fact that her solitude is reflected in him.

 

Maybe she even likes it in him. After all, reinventing herself hadn’t been so bad with his eyes to do it through.

 

Another combination lift, her favourite to finish. There’s a lot of, well - decadence in this one; it’s a lover’s dance. (Mako would call it something sterile and euphemistic like _immoderation_ and then pour it out with a hundred per cent of his heart anyway, talk about mixed signals.) She inhales to push up.

 

Almost there. She curls over his shoulders as she spins, skimming the short hairs at the back of his neck with her fingers. It’s her favourite finish because she can rest before they’re done, and with no fear of being _implicated_ , with her head above his and his eyes all but hidden in the cove of her collarbone. The world accelerates.

 

She leans on him with the abandon she wants, two blissful seconds, where he holds her so close. Her hair spilling inelegantly onto his own shoulders - his head under her chin - surely he can hear her heart beat. Surely he’s listening.

 

It’s nothing telltale; it can’t be because they’re both gasping for breath on the comedown anyway, but she likes the idea. Her triumphant body can run away with her head in a moment like this, and when they meet each other the final time she feels it intensify to a kind of painful joy. The crowd erupts.

 

 _This_ is her favourite part.

 

The gold is his head against hers, their joint breaths heavy with weightless devotion. The dance a guiltless tryst, the routine anything but, the impossible spins merely a means to this end. And she’s always closest to giving in here, such pleasant distress.

 

Mako doesn’t let her go.

 

This is new - he blinks and his focus is _still_ her; and in any other moment she might have to look away. Then she knows, vividly, suddenly - because she doesn’t look away - that this feeling is the same she carries for him, same bright, ardent burst. It’s full and pure, and it wipes any dregs of bitterness away.

 

Oh, wow. She loses her barely regained breath, not just because he holds her _tighter_. She _recognises_ it: this reverent gaze her very own. 

 

Like many of her weaknesses, bare and beautiful when he wears it.

 

Asami’s breaths slow, the clutch on his shoulders still rigid with exhilaration. Nervous, ecstatic smile. She brings him into her neck, lets her fingers curl in his hair and kisses the corner of his head.

 


End file.
